


The Symbolism of Topping

by yourlibrarian



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Inspired by Fanfiction, M/M, Meta, fandom tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 19:44:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6719296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’ve been noticing, after a few months of reading SPN fic that I seemed to be seeing the Spike effect all over again. I saw a discussion about Sam/Dean fic and who always seems to be topping.  Which is a funny starting place to me because it seems to be an important issue for many people, yet for the longest time in fic I never really noticed it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Symbolism of Topping

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted June 15, 2007

I’ve been noticing, after a few months of reading SPN fic that I seemed to be seeing the Spike effect all over again. I saw a discussion about Sam/Dean fic and who always seems to be topping. Which is a funny starting place to me because it seems to be an important issue for many people, yet for the longest time in fic I never really noticed it. The earliest slash I read in BtVS was S/A and it’s hardly news to say those two have major issues with one another, and certainly around S5 none of them good. In retrospect, I know they were written as Angel topping, but then the stories revolved around Angel trying to keep Spike down in a more figurative sense so I probably didn’t pay attention because it all flowed together. Afterwards, I read S/X and not only do they switch off far more often but there’s also a practical reason given for the decision, namely the presence of Spike’s chip. 

So I don’t think until I read some meta that I realized what a big issue this was and that people searched out fic based on -- what to me at least -- was the logistics of a sexual position. For example, I couldn’t imagine looking for S/B fic based on whether or not Buffy was on top during a given scene. Or you know, Anya/Xander or Willow/Oz or fill-in-the-blank. Which doesn’t mean that power issues weren’t explored in those fics, but the focus on this particular point always seems to come up in slash writing and reading. 

Obviously there’s more going on than that. When asked why it seems that Sam is always topping, my first response was that it was for two reasons. The first is that fanfic seems to really fetishize bodies, especially male bodies (or maybe I’m just not reading fanfic that does the same to women). Although this can extend to anything, something that seems to cut across fandoms is the height fetish, which often gets followed by the "feminization" of the shorter man (even if the height difference is minimal). I know I’ve seen that written about before, especially in BtVS fandom, so I won’t belabor the point. In SPN no one can miss the height difference that Sam has with, well, everyone. However while I may have read very little Angel/Wes or Wes/Gunn fic, the fact that Gunn is almost Sam’s height and that Wes is taller than Angel never seemed to come up. And while I haven’t read any strictly Buffy/Riley fic, I have seen fic that had them in it and it was oddly not much of a focus. This despite the fact that it’s one case where I could really see making an issue of it, because that height difference was so great that it seems to me it would be a problem. 

So physical differences aside, I think this tendency to put Sam “in charge” has far more to do with the characters’ storylines and motivations than anything else. And that’s where Spike comes in. In Spike’s case what stood out was the fact that he was a minor character whose role and influence grew season by season for various reasons I won’t bother going into. It was thus easy to recognize him as a breakout character, as well as by the eventual complexity of his storyline. In the case of SPN there are hardly any recurring characters who last past a few episodes, and even though we’ve not yet started S3, if BtVS was SPN we’d be seeing bunches of Jonathan fic at this stage. I mean, I’ve seen various Pastor Jim fics and he got one scene and a few throwaway references in S1.

The point is that the closest SPN has to a breakout character so far is Bobby and he’s not the focus of that much fic. So I think it’s not pushing it too far to say that it’s actually Dean, even if he is one of the leads. It would be easy to say he’s the most popular character because more people are attracted to the actor, but I also think it’s because of certain key traits. Dean is strongly lauded for his caretaking and sacrificial qualities. While these are certainly traits of his, and they were hammered home with an anvil in the S2 finale, I think the fandom latched on to this well before the show itself emphasized it. Given that these are traits traditionally associated with women (with mothering at that), I think any man who takes on that role in a show, particularly if he is denoted as a desirable male, is likely to be a breakout fic character. Again, see Spike.

In fact Spike and Dean share more than a few traits in common. Both are snarky and irreverent, have an uncomplicated view of life, are against authority in general yet are excellent lieutenants, are no-nonsense yet devious, are deadly and violent yet caretakers during their lives (Dean is way better at this than Spike, but given he’s human you’d hope he would be). They are also compellingly attractive to others (if not the audience) and yet are boorish and often objects of humor. (And they both drive black autos of envy but nothing can touch Dean’s identification with the Impala). 

The one difference in their general outlines is how they relate to women. However, I think this gets somewhat skewed by the differences in the shows. Because Buffy is a show with a female lead, all characters must relate to her and there are various continuing female characters who allow for a lot of diversity in approach. On SPN women are transient figures. I also think it's easily argued that if a woman is not _the_ woman to Spike, he's not any more devoted than Dean is. They both like to relax in strip clubs and bars after all, and Spike's stalking of Buffy was hardly what you'd call classy.

I think what really needs to be looked at is how they relate to the main character in the show -- in Spike’s case, Buffy, in Dean’s case, Sam.

Although I haven’t spent a year watching the show week by week and thus missed all sorts of meta and speculation, it seemed clear to me from watching the pilot that Sam was meant to be the main character. I got this reading not only from the pilot itself, where we begin with Sam being taken out of his comfort zone into his brother’s world, and thus being the viewpoint through which we start piecing things together, but also from meta elements. I was surprised JP had top billing, not only because I’d never heard of him before SPN (no, I never watched Gilmore Girls) but because he was the younger actor, and if they were co-leads JA should have been first alphabetically. Further it seems that the main concentration was on casting Sam first (not surprising as he’s the more complicated character on the page). Lastly, the CW is strongly pitching itself at college-age students. Although Kripke’s idea may have originally been to have two working-class, small-town guys driving around the country together, we start out with Sam in his final year at Stanford acing LSATs, with a steady college girlfriend and about to head into law school. Those are meaningful codes mostly to college-age students (or their parents), and that seems to say he’s meant to be the audience stand-in. Moreover it is always Sam who seems to enforce middle/upper-middle class standards of propriety compared to poor, gauche Dean. It’s not surprising Sam’s the one generally shown to be best at interviewing characters of the week, who are all generally middle/upper-middle class characters themselves, nor that he is the one expert at researching (or at least miraculously finding materials online and in libraries that would never exist in those places in non-TV life, but I nitpick). As a result, Sam continues to be exposition boy, forever setting the scene for the audience.

So it seems to me Sam has always been the center of the story. He’s the one pushing for the hunt after the pilot; stressing finding their father; developing the visions and becoming more mysterious; the one making the final decisions in the finale of S1; and the one whose POV we begin with in S2. Dean is a largely reactive character through most of the series, and he’s reacting to Sam. The one exception is in terms of physical action. Dean is still the one who rescues Sam, and even when he needs rescuing is aided by Sam but usually saves himself in the end. 

In this he is rather better off than Spike who never rescued Buffy but was at times rescued himself. When I was first watching the series, particularly by S6, I was struck by how strongly Spike was being coded as lower-class. Not by his speech and dress so much as his storyline and the way he was universally dismissed by those around him. Within the show he was a vampire, but it seemed to me his story was exactly that of the boy from the wrong side of the tracks trying to romance Daddy’s princess and never being quite good enough (even if by S6 Buffy had neither father nor mother and was herself headed for lower-class status economically). So I think it’s interesting than in SPN, we see Sam coded as middle/upper and Dean coded as working/lower. 

The thing that I think cemented Spike’s status as the fic magnet of the Buffyverse is not only that his underclass status coded him as diminished in some way (except in sheer physicality, which is itself something generally coded onto oppressed groups), but simply that he is the one being left. He may not have minded it when Harmony left him (however weak she was, she did kick him out the first time), but he certainly minded it every other time. And Spike does have a tendency to go for princesses, just look at the first lines Spike and Dru say to one another. Spike suffers by being the one who cares, who cares too much in fact, and who (irresistibly to some) can’t seem to stop.

If there’s one thing we know about Dean, he got left by the people who mattered to him the most. Even though in terms of pre-series canon he worked closely with his father and was on his own relatively recently, it was presented that he fears being alone, and that the people closest to him have all left. Spike and Dean have both been devoted sons to the single parents they had. (We don’t know what was the larger story of William’s family, but clearly he and his mother have been on their own for a while by 1880). They’ve both had those parents turn against them in very similar ways, even if both showed their love at the very end. That initial love for the parent transferred to their secondary object of affection, in Dean’s case, Sam. 

It was Dean who went to Sam, not, as Sam points out, because he needs to but, because as Dean points out, he wants to. And Dean spends most of Season 1 worrying that Sam is going to leave him again. In fact, Sam does leave (even if he returns) and states outright to Dean later that he doesn’t want to return to the way things used to be. Sam is always the one pulling away. This may seem off at first, since within canon Sam is always the one trying to get people to open up and is seen as the more compassionate character. But in fact Sam guards his own secrets pretty closely and they’re bigger, more critical secrets than Dean’s. It’s not surprising Dean resists this –- Sam has enough power over him already. When it came to women they were involved with, it wasn’t Dean who kept his mouth shut. And it is generally Dean who is quicker to tell people the truth about what he and Sam do (witness “Nightshifter”) or to open up to a near-stranger (Gordon). 

With Buffy and Spike, it was definitely Spike who did most of the talking, however his position is very different from Dean’s. Spike is, for most of the series, of no significance to Buffy, certainly not tied to her in any way. He is also but one of many characters through which we can see her. With Sam and Dean, they must talk to one another for us to hear them even though they do talk to other people about one another constantly. So in terms of who does the talking, I think Dean and Spike do differ, but I think this has a lot to do with their show setups. Certainly neither has a problem telling anyone the truth baldly.

What is significant to me about the way SPN S2 ends is not that Dean has made the ultimate sacrifice for Sam. We all knew he would. He had done it, after all, in the Wishverse even if that was bound up with his larger duty of hunting. Rather it is that as S3 is set up we know that Sam will stick around now that the YED is dead _because_ he must save Dean. I find it interesting that it’s not automatically assumed that Sam will be there solely because they have a new war on their hands –- he still needs to be given a reason to stay. 

In any relationship the person on the bottom is the one who has the most to lose and the person on top the one who can most easily walk away. With both Buffy and Spike and Sam and Dean, it’s pretty clear who that person is.


End file.
